EP 63: Nyx, The Darkest Goddess

Nyx. the goddess of night, appeared before the Olympic gods, even before the Titans. Her progeny were almost all beings of terror and dread, and included Doom, Death, Sleep, Dreams, Blame, Misery, The Fates, Retribution, Old Age and Strife. Yet as terrifying as her family was, civilization may have resulted from their enforcement of the natural order.

Transcript

PODCAST #63: Nyx, The Darkest Goddess

How many terrifying goddesses and demi-goddesses have we visited in these episodes? There have been more than a half dozen.

You may think first of Hekate. Modern witches have taken her as their own...

In episode 18 we met The Fates, the three sisters who decided when every man, woman and child would die. No one welcomed their presence. No one wished them near ...

In another show we learned about Medea, who meddled in herbs and magic. To revenge her husband Jason’s double-dealing, she took the lives of their children and mocked him with her laughter …

Who else? There was the Sphinx who set up a roadblock for all who tried to enter Thebes. She posed a riddle and ate every man who failed her test. All failed but one.

In a later episode we followed the hero Perseus, who was in pursuit of one of the most feared goddesses in the ancient world. 

I speak of course of Medusa, with snakes as hair. One look at her would turn anyone to stone.

Let’s not neglect Persephone, Demeter’s lovely daughter who was snatched by Hades and dragged screaming into the depths of the Underworld. 

Although she protested, she was made queen of the darkness and, in time, embraced the dismal world of the dead.

Hekate, the three Fates, Medea, Medusa, the Sphinx, and even Persephone — these were dark, dour divinities who filled men’s minds with fear.

They represent quite the collection. But there’s one goddess — a primal deity — I have kept under cover. 

And under cover is where she belongs. For this one goddess created Doom … Death … Sleep … Dreams … Blame … Misery … The Fates … Retribution … Old Age … and even Strife.

Who is she? The English translation for her name is Night. But the Greeks knew her as Nyx, she whose impenetrable darkness covered the earth.

As you’ll see shortly, she bubbled up out of the void, a thing borne of nothing …

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Welcome to episode 63 of GARNER'S GREEK MYTHOLOGY. We have listeners from over 190 countries ... So welcome to everyone, wherever you are.

I'm your host, mythologist PATRICK GARNER. Remember to visit AMAZON to check out my books about the GREEK GODS in the contemporary world. 

They’re part of THE NAXOS QUARTET, and include THE WINNOWING, CYCLADIC GIRLS, HOMO DIVINITAS and ALL THAT LASTS.

All have been Amazon best sellers and are a provocative read. Book sales keep this podcast going, so I invite you to buy all four.

So who are the characters in these books? Your favorite GREEK GODS, of course ... 

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Ah yes, Nyx, the goddess of night. And should we call her Night? … No.

On this podcast we honor the ancient Greeks, I’ll only refer to her as Nyx, she of the gloom, she who birthed many children, most of whom were dismal creatures of her darkness.

She preceded the Olympic gods and even the Titans. She sprang from the initial forms of energy called the  primal gods.. These raw beings were the original creators. 

Nyx was one of the first manifestations to appear. And certainly the darkest, for over and over she bore children who were the things of nightmares and the stuff of destruction. 

With one exception, her progeny were beings of terror, fright and dread. The one exception was a goddess known as Philotes, or Tenderness.

Tenderness was associated with love and sleep. But Tenderness was a true anomaly — a misfit among Nyx’s children. 

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We never think about Nyx without being reminded of her offspring. 

But wait: Before we talk about them you may wonder how Nyx came to be. You may think,“You said earlier she came from the void, from nothing —”

“But,” you’ll say, “how could that be? Nothing is created out of nothing …“ 

In this case, when we’re discussing the goddess Nyx, you’d be wrong.

To explain her origin, we have to go back to the beginning. That is, the beginning as the old Greeks saw it. It was all explained by Hesiod in the Theogony. 

In about 700 B.C., almost 3,000 years ago, he recounted the earth’s origin.

Hesiod said that in the beginning was the Void. The Greeks called this void, Chaos. Chaos was a dark, gaping place. It was neither good nor bad. 

Not content to spin alone in empty space, Chaos generated three great beings named Gaia, Tartaros and Eros. That wasn’t all. Chaos was hardly through with making mischief. 

In their footsteps, Nyx, the darkest of these forces, appeared.

Nyx had no mother or father. Instead, she arose spontaneously from Chaos. It’s enough to scramble your head, but think of Chaos as if it were a black hole or a dark star. 

Imagine Nyx being spit out from this dreadful emptiness, coughed up from the bowels of Chaos. She came from nothing, yet became a dreadful force.

Indeed, she was the original Goth girl. Imagine her arms covered in tattoos, black hair matted over her cloak, her face always in a scowl. 

On top of that, she was a bully. How? Helios, the sun, seeing her approach, fled in fear at the end of each day. 

Triumphant, Nyx covered the sky for hours in an impenetrable cloak. In effect, she drove away all light. 

This light /dark repetition became a daily, eternal pattern. The mighty Helios ran from Nyx, her inky blackness impossible to overcome. 

Nyx was his tormenter. However glorious Helios seemed, Nyx always, without exception, hounded daylight away. We may assume this nastiness was all part of Chaos’s plan.

Hesiod described the relationship between day and night as follows:

“There stands the dreadful house of shadowy Nyx, shrouded in clouds of blackness … this is where Nyx and Helios draw near and greet each other as they cross the great bronze threshold. 

“One goes into the house and comes out the door, and the house never holds them both within, but always one is outside and passing over the earth, while the other waits at home until it is time to go. 

“One carries far-seeing light for the people on earth, but the other, baleful Nyx, shrouded in misty clouds, carries in her arms Sleep, the brother of Death …”

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In the same way that Chaos had created her, Nyx without a partner created multiple children. The Greeks had a word for this phenomenon.

They called it parthenogenesis. Parthenos meant virgin. And genesis meant creation. We might say Nyx was such a powerful female that she needed no male to complete her plans.

She was the archetype for the term virgin birth. Nyx was the original single mother whose children grew up only under her dark wings, a creature so powerful she needed no male.

And thus she conceived over a dozen ghastly beings. They came one after another, spilling into the world as if they had one purpose only: that was, to torment humans.

Think of it. Her children were Doom, Death, Sleep, Dreams, Blame, Misery, The Fates, Retribution, Old Age and Strife. Even today, all of these maladies remain part of the mortal realm. 

Why only mortals? The gods hardly worried about death. Their dreams were peaceful. They rarely knew misery. Doom was no more than a concept, and old age was a cruel joke the gods themselves played on men.

Although mortals were created long after the gods, we might easily conclude that Chaos created Nyx in anticipation of them coming. One could make a case that she existed solely to trouble humankind.

And so it was that when humans began to walk the earth, the vile children of Nyx awaited them, like eager wolves watching unsuspecting deer.

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Some of Nyx’s children were more abstractions than real beings. For instance, Misery and Deceit were generalities for common human problems.

Others we might consider abstractions were Blame and Old Age. They caused problems known to all humans.

But Hesiod carefully described many of her children, and for the ancient Greeks, they were as real as any human child.

For instance, the brothers Death and Sleep were were believed to live together in Tartaros, deep below the earth. 

Linking them made sense. It was believed that sleep was no more than a breath away from death. 

Hesiod wrote of the pair,

“Oh Sleep and Death, those terrible gods. The shining sun never looks upon them with his light. Sleep roams the earth and the broad back of the sea, gentle and kind to man, but Death has a heart of iron, and a spirit pitiless as bronze. 

“Death holds fast to any man he catches, and is hated even by the immortal gods.”

Hesiod’s opinion was a common one. Sleeping, which no one could avoid, meant taking a risk, night after night.

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Like Death and Sleep, Dreams was another of Nyx’s offspring. In time the singular god Dreams was believed to have had a thousand sons. 

One never knew which son would come at night. It could be  a good dream,or a nightmare. 

The poet Ovid wrote that, “When a Dream is needed, that dream wakes and flies on swift wings in seconds to anywhere, to anyone on earth.”

But dreams were hardly as dark as The Fates. Greeks knew The Fates as the Moirai. They were three sisters — Lachesis, Klotho and Atropos. 

They were, in effect, goddesses of predestination. They assigned a destiny to each living thing. 

No one escaped them. At birth a human was assigned a life span. It might be 60 years, six months or six seconds. 

When that fixed time ran out, The Fates cut the thread that held together the human’s life. No one could intervene. 

Even Zeus was unable to change the ticking clock set in motion by The Fates, although he is known to have successfully pleaded with them once. 

As Athene explains in Homer’s Odyssey, “Death comes to every one alike, and not even the gods can fend it away from a man they love, when the destructive doom of death lays a man low and overpowers him.”

If death came as a result of a heinous crime like murdering one’s parents, the evil-doer was pursued by the three Furies, agents of the Fates who took vengeance by driving the perpetrator mad. 

Another of Nyx’s children was Nemesis, a name which we translate as meaning retribution. Nemesis was the goddess who represented the righteous indignation felt by gods and men alike at anyone who violated the natural order of things. 

Such a violation might be the breaking of a moral code or being too rich, or too happy, or even too filled with pride. 

Anyone guilty of these things could expect retribution. Looking back on it all, it’s fair to say that Nemesis was the enemy of excess. 

Perhaps fittingly, she was said to be the mother of Helen of Troy, the woman whose beauty outshone every other woman’s. 

As you’ll recall, Helen’s abduction triggered the ten-year Trojan war, and her beauty came to no good.

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We’re far from through describing Nyx’s progeny. Who next? Let’s look at Doom. Doom was actually multiple goddesses, beings the Greeks called Keres.

They were death-spirits who flourished on the death of mortals. In a work attributed to Hesiod, they were identified as, quote,

“The blacks Dooms, gnashing their white teeth, grim-eyed, fierce, bloody, terrifying, fighting like wolves over men who were dying, for they were all longing to drink dark blood.

“As soon as they caught a man who had fallen, or one newly wounded, one of them clasped her great claws around him and his soul went down to Hades, to chilly Tartaros.

“And when they had satisfied their hearts with human blood, they would throw that dead one behind them, and rush back again onto the battleground — ”

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Closely associated with the Dooms was Strife, a dark goddess the Greeks called Eris. She lived on battlefields. Homer described her as:

“Strife incessantly raging, sister and comrade of the murderous war-god Ares. She at first holds her head low, but then strides the earth with her head rearing toward heaven.

“She moves through the throng of battle, casting evil in their midst and ever increasing men’s sorrow.”

With the exception of Nemesis, Strife was the only one of Nyx’s progeny to produce children of her own. Her offspring were as disagreeable as Strife herself.

She, like her mother, became pregnant through parthenogenesis. In a torrent she bore Toil, Neglect, Famine, Pain, Battles, Conflict, Bloodshed, Slaughter, Quarrels, Lies, Disputes, Lawlessness and Delusion.

It was quite a brood of suffering. Each of these afflictions became a grandchild of Nyx. Just imagine this family getting together around a dinner table for the holidays!

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To the Greeks, man was not borne with original sin. Sin was unknown. Humans were believed to be borne as pure beings, unblemished and without blame.

But the gods held them to high expectations. It was men’s actions that tripped them up. If they failed to uphold moral codes, Nyx’s offspring appeared.

If a man killed another who was not on a battlefield, Doom, the death-spirits, or the Furies would exact revenge .

If a woman betrayed another, Dreams might appear in the form of endless, agonizing nightmares. 

If a village failed to pay tribute to a god, Famine might sweep through their rich crops of wheat and blacken their olive orchards.

And if a merchant cheated a customer, the god Disputes might sully the merchant’s name. Worse, the merchant might be introduced to the brother of Disputes, an even nastier god known as Lawlessness.

Nyx represented ill fortune, hazard, fate and destiny. From an early age all Greeks knew that, if they strayed from natural laws, divine hazards awaited them at every turn.

Nyx and her offspring were both terrors and enforcers. They brought torment and in equal measure, compelled men to follow the law.

In the same way that Helios, the glorious sun, represented light, Nyx was his opposite. The two, filling the sky with either golden rays or inky blackness, created a strange but recognized equilibrium.

You could even say that Nyx set up mankind for civilization. How? Early man either obeyed moral codes or faced punishment.

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As an aside before I end this episode, I’ll note that Nyx and The Fates play key roles in my novel, The Winnowing.

The Fates appear in our time, and mock many of our cherished moral codes. Dark Nyx is called upon to reign in her children, and the goddess Artemis acts as her counterbalance of light.

Day and night, life and death, even yin and yang. Our world spins in an endless balance. So it has always been.

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